A tale of two cities, told this time by Sharon Schmidt in Substance (March): “On January 3 Daley rang in the New Year with Alderman Patrick Levar of the 45th Ward, on the Northwest side. The occasion was the ribbon cutting ceremony of the $10.6 million addition to the Portage Park Elementary School, 5330 W. Berteau. Daley and his large cast of Chicago public school appointees celebrated the new school building, where a new addition and repairs, landscaping and wrought iron fences had been added to the original school. . . . One week later, in one of the working class (and African American) communities on the city’s South Side, sewer water seeped up through the floors in a school lunchroom. Faculty helped the kids avoid the standing water when they moved around the room, carrying their trays of food to their tables. The school was the Anderson Community Academy, located at 6315 S. Claremont, in an area where the homes are almost identical to those in the Portage Park community.” On January 26, 15th Ward alderman Ted Thomas reminded school board president Gery Chico that he had complained a year earlier about the appalling conditions at Anderson and had been promised a response within 30 days, which never came. “Anderson is on our list,” replied Chico. “Believe me. It’s not like we have the money and we don’t want to give it to you.”
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Gay, Catholic, and ornately closeted. Mark Jordan, author of The Silence of Sodom (University of Chicago Press), writes, “Contemporary quarrels over Catholic liturgy resemble clashes between competing forms of gay sensibility. Indeed, they are often those very same clashes in a different venue” (press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/410412.html).
